2014 Customer Experience Excellence Award

We will be launching the 2015 CX Excellence Awards in mid-September, so keep an eye on this blog.

Congratulations to the following companies that are winners of the 2014 Temkin Group Customer Experience Excellence (CxE) Award:

Dell, EMC, and Touchpoint Support Services 

In addition to the winners, we congratulate the other finalists: Aetna, Activision, Crowe Horwath, The Results Company, and Texas.gov.

Here are some highlights from their nominations:

• Activision Customer Care. Activision demonstrates its commitment to creating great game player experiences in a multitude of ways, such as emphasizing the use of player feedback to identify improvement opportunities. Activision combines this dedication to listening to its players with a willingness to redesign significant interactions. For example, it revamped its “Contact Us” page to include ambassador chat and callback scheduling, which resulted in higher satisfaction and lower effort for customers.
• Aetna. Despite being in an industry undergoing tremendous change, Aetna is focusing on its 2020 vision to make the company 100% customer-centric. It has implemented many changes to help achieve this goal, including providing service over the phone and investing in text and speech analytics to better identify customer pain points and improve the behaviors and skillsets of its call representatives. The latter effort has already resulted in reduced repeat calls, improved accuracy, and a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Crowe Horwath. With a client engagement score towering 33 points above the accounting industry average, Crowe Horwath is seeing the pay-off of its efforts to deliver an exceptional client experience. These efforts include establishing a firm-wide governance model and measurement scorecard, implementing a closed-loop voice of the customer program, incorporating customer journey mapping to uncover moments of truth, and engaging employees through training, client-driven CX recognition programs, and an employee ambassador program.
• Dell. Dell’s CX efforts start with an emphasis on listening to and engaging with customers and employees. Dell enlists different groups from across the company—including engineering, marketing, sales, support, and digital—to make improvements to the entire customer journey. As a result of this work, Dell has opened 16 solution centers—which gives customers a place to experience solutions—and has provided proactive support over a wide variety of social channels, simplified Dell.com for consumer and business users, and implemented more than 540 customer innovation ideas.
• EMC Corporation. The Total Customer Experience (TCE) program at EMC works across the enterprise to enhance the company’s customer experience by listening to customer feedback, analyzing data, and taking directed action based on that feedback and data. The program also raises awareness of how every person at the company impacts customer experience. As its CX efforts have matured, the TCE team has evolved to take on more challenging tasks; its projects now include predictive CX analytics, measuring its partner experience quality, and optimizing the experience across many different customer segments and solutions.
• The Results Companies. To support its work as a business process outsourcing provider, The Results Companies uses its own unique operating model called CX360, which allows for continuous business process refinements that improve the customer experience. Built on three pillars—people, knowledge, empowerment—CX360 has helped the company ensure that its 8,500 employees around the globe remain focused on CX. The operating model has also contributed to Results’ strong growth in new clients and year-over-year revenue.
• Texas NICUSA/Texas.gov. Texas NICUSA provides support for Texas.gov and implements technology solutions for Texas governmental agencies. It serves over 50,000 monthly site visitors and 300 state and local governments. Its three-tiered multi-channel customer service approach includes a general customer service Help Desk (phone and online), a Service Desk to support governmental agency needs, and a group of Technology Subject Matter Experts who can provide escalated assistance to either citizens or agency employees.
• TouchPoint Support Services. TouchPoint Support Services streamlines support services within healthcare facilities. The company’s business goals, known as Top of Mind Objectives, guide the work of its 6,800 associates, helping them to find inefficiencies and improve patient satisfaction, associate engagement, safety, unity, and budget compliance. Touchpoint uses many methods for aligning employees with these objectives, including special training for managers and frontline employees, coaching from dedicated customer experience managers (who visit sites regularly), and associate recognition programs.

Background on the CxE Awards

Across all industries and sectors, organizations are findings ways to improve customer experience in a sustainable manner. The CxE Awards are meant to highlight those transformational efforts. Since customer experience is a journey, not a program, nominees will not need to have fully completed their journey to be eligible for this award.

Last year’s winners were AIG Asia Pacific, Cisco, EMC, Intuit, and Oracle. You can find best practices from across all 11 finalists and see their nomination forms in the Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence.

The awards are based on the following criteria:

• Transformation. What improvements have been and are being made in the four customer experience core competencies?
  • Purposeful leadership: Leaders operate consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values.
  • Compelling brand values: Brand attributes are driving decisions about how you treat customers.
  • Employee engagement: Employees are fully committed to the goals of your organization.
  • Customer connectedness: Customer feedback and insight is integrated throughout your organization.
• Results. How is the effort creating value for customers and for the company?
• Sustainability. How well is the company setup for ongoing success?

We assembled an expert panel of judges who really understand what it takes for an organization to become more customer-centric:

• Ginger Conlon is editor-in-chief of Direct Marketing News. She develops and directs its editorial vision and content strategy across all communications platforms. She was cited as one of the “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter,” by Huffington Post contributor Vala Afshar.
• Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations.  He is a customer service expert, speaker and author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books including The Cult of the Customer and The Amazement Revolution.
• Ingrid Lindberg is Customer Experience Officer of Prime Therapeutics. She is a proven change management and customer strategy executive whose previous roles include Customer Experience Officer at CIGNA and Chief Marketing Officer at Ceridian Benefits Services.
• Aimee Lucas is CX Transformist & Vice President of Temkin Group. She has over 15 years of experience improving service delivery and transforming the customer experience through people development and process improvement initiatives.
• Bruce Temkin is CX Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He is widely recognized as a customer experience thought leader and chairman of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org).
• Bob Thompson is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. He has over three decades of experience in customer-facing management and consulting roles.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Answers to questions that came up:

• We want to include confidential information, will it be shared? Do not submit any confidential information. If you are selected as a finalist, then we will share your entire nomination form in a published report. We do not share any information about companies that are not selected as finalists.
• Is there any fee for applying? No. There are no fees of any sort for applying and no hidden fees that will affect the judging of applicants.
• Can vendors submit applications on behalf of their clients? No. They can help prepare submissions for their clients, but the nominations must come directly from the company being nominated.
• Can non-profit organizations apply? Absolutely. The CxE Award is meant to recognize any organization that is making significant and sustainable improvements in its customer experience, whether its a for-profit company, non-profit organization, or a government agency.
• Is this award only for consumer-based businesses? No. The CxE Award is not only for business-to-consumer businesses, we also expect many business-to-business applicants.
• If we are one of the winners, will we be able to put out a press release? Yes. All of the finalists and award winners will be able to refer to this award in any communications.
• We don’t have the best customer experience in our industry, is it worth entering? Maybe. We are looking for customer experience efforts that are having a positive effect. So it is worth entering if you are making progress.
• Will there be more than one winner? Probably. We expect that their will be multiple winners, but we will determine the number based on the nominations.
• Can we enter if we are not in the U.S.? Yes. This award is open for entrants from around the world. The only requirement is that the nomination form must be completed in English.
• We are doing some great things in a part of our company, but not everywhere. Is it worth applying? Yes, as long as your efforts aren’t just in one narrow area. Transformation often starts within areas of a company.
• Can we send in more than one nomination for a company? Maybe. Since this award looks across several aspects of your CX efforts, it probably only makes sense to submit more than one if there are different efforts underway within different operating groups.